Viewing profile — kcl

The differential equations course was one of the most baffling experiences I ever had. The professor on the first day told us the course would be rote, as opposed to proofs, and ev…

> numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature. This is an open and ancient question. I don't suppos…

There is an entire world here beyond registering for a signal that comment seems unaware of. Even the simplest of preliminaries: registering for a signal is arguably non-trivial an…

It is true this improves the bad path. It ignores desired happy path cases: downstream processes, custom debugging, graceful shutdown, preserved workspaces, and so on.

The way exceptions are handled as a result of siglongjmp'ing out of a signal handler is currently platform-inconsistent and one of the many dark areas I alluded to. It isn't even c…

This conversation is silly. You are snapshotting the transformative window. If you snapshotted the internet in the 70s or 80s you'd get a much more mundane picture. I don't know if…

GC researchers insist on conflating GC with all of automatic memory management. The public doesn't do this and neither does the article. > Secondly, you know what's cheaper... Not …

Your comment is radically naive. You can't literally believe what a business writes in its PR spin. The only thing you can take away from this is that Visa intends to tip the balan…

Your approach will not work. Either continue attempting proofs or give up. It's fine to read the answers after you've tried. > I've heard many many times that you can only learn ma…

I don't know where this method of argumentation came from, but it's obnoxious and I'm over it. There are even soyjaks for this. Either you don't know and you're being lazy (I don't…

Right, you are the cop-out I am complaining about. Linus is the premier figurehead of the premier open-source project. When a build tool he made for that project goes viral it isn'…

Git's UI/UX is one of the worst engineering sins to be committed in the last two decades, and this website shows why. Literally nothing about git is intuitive and the "underlying m…

The problem with concurrent computing is not a lack of Erlang awareness or message passing awareness. If either was the solution we wouldn't be having this discussion since they bo…

I've written on this problem before: https://kevinlawler.com/parallel One issue is that the pthread model is too low level (think AND and OR gates), but you must include it for com…

I've run this experiment with friends and it was trivial to distinguish reds from whites with table wines. Whatever wines they use in these studies to stump experts must be more cl…

Is Joel a supervillain? Why is Joel writing this and, given his obvious conflict of interest, addressing it to developers as if it were friendly advice, when it is not? I advise pe…